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The first principle of slow productivity is do fewer things. Now this idea scares a lot of people when they first hear it because they interpret do fewer things to mean accomplish fewer things. When I say do fewer things, what I really mean is do fewer things at once.
Overhead tax
Every time you agree to a commitment that you’re going to actively work on, that commitment is going to bring with it overhead. It’s going to be emails you have to send about that commitment. It’s going to be meetings you have to attend.
So what happens as you say yes to more and more things? Well, the amount of this administrative overhead is going to begin to aggregate, which means more and more of your day is going to be dedicated towards servicing your commitments as opposed to actually making progress on them. I call this the overhead tax. Everything you say yes to requires you to pay some overhead tax. So as you say yes to more and more things, the amount of overhead tax you have to pay begins to pile up until the cost becomes unsustainable. You’re always going to be switching from one to another, never letting anything get your full attention. This is a self-imposed reduction of cognitive capacity, so you’re producing worse work. Even worse, it’s a psychological state that is exhausting and frustrating, so the experience of work itself just becomes subjectively very negative.
What happens if I’m working on fewer things at once? There’s less administrative overhead. So now more of my day can actually be spent trying to complete these commitments, which means I’m going to complete them faster. The quality level is going to be higher as well because I can give them uninterrupted concentration. So now I’m delivering really good work and I’m actually delivering really good work at a much faster pace and my day is no longer deranging but actually satisfying and meaningful. This is a much better configuration for how to handle workloads.
So this then becomes a key challenge of slow productivity. In a world where there’s lots of things to do, how can I keep the number of things I’m actively working on at once to a very sustainable, small level?
Start at the top
So if we’re going to do fewer things, we have to be aware of where all these things actually come from. And there’s really a hierarchy here that makes sense. So it’s not just what am I doing today. The things I’m doing today are generated by the projects I’ve agreed to. And the projects I’ve agreed to are being generated by the bigger picture missions that I’m pursuing in my work. So if we want to reduce what I’m doing at the small scale, we have to start by reducing what I’m doing at the large scale.
So reduce the number of major missions you’re pursuing in your work. Don’t have six major products that your start-up is going to introduce. Make it one. Don’t have three areas in your law firm where you’re going to overhaul your practice. Just choose one. Once you’ve limited the missions, don’t place too much work into your given day. It might be tempting to say, if I did six things for each of my two projects today, that would be great. I’d really make progress, but it’s too much. You’re going to get overloaded. So we have to start at the top if we want to end up, when we get to the day in front of us, not having too much to do.
We can also be very careful when choosing projects to evaluate them not just on how important they are, but on how many small tasks they’re going to generate. So consider, for example, you’re choosing between a project like organizing an upcoming client visit versus a project like writing a research report on a new software tool that’s available in your sector. Now that first project is going to generate a lot of small tasks. You have to coordinate with logistics, and are we going to have food in the conference room, and who’s going to reimburse the visitor’s flight? Whereas the second project is going to have many fewer of these small tasks. It’s more focused on just you thinking hard. In this circumstance, all things being equal, choose the second project.
Don’t upset your boss
So if you’re worried about how you as an individual can do fewer things without upsetting your boss or without upsetting your clients, here’s an idea that could work. Make your workload transparent, and make a differentiation in your workload between what you’re actively doing and what you’re waiting to do next. So let’s get concrete about this. Imagine you have a shared document, and at the top of this document, you have two or three projects that you have labeled as active. You’re actively working on these projects. You’re emailing people about them. You’re scheduling meetings about them. Then you have below that a list, an ordered list that you call your waiting queue. And these are the projects you’ve agreed to, but you’re not working on yet. So as you finish an active project, you’re going to pull the first thing off of this waiting queue and make that active.
So now let’s say a boss says, okay. I want you to work on this project. You say, great. This sounds like a great project. Happy to do it. Let’s throw it onto this list. In fact, you can help tell me where we should put it on here because I want to make sure I’m matching your perceived priority about this. In this way, you’re actually increasing the rate at which you accomplish things. You’re letting your boss have a bigger say on how you’re managing and prioritizing your workload, but your day-to-day experience of work is going to be substantially better because the amount of time you have to spend talking about work and thinking about work is going to be reduced, and the amount of time you’re going to spend doing work is going to be greatly increased.